I didn’t much care for “The Wire” the first time around, but the second season looks much more promising.

This is more like it.

For reasons I cannot quite identify, the show – which felt annoyingly slow in Season 1 – seems to have been energized.

The characters – both the new ones and the returning ones – seem more interesting this time.

They’ve even revamped the series’ theme song, “Way Down in the Hole,” written by Tom Waits.

Last season they used a jazzy version sung by the gospel group Blind Boys of Alabama. This year, they’ve picked up Waits’ own 1987 recording of the song, a much creepier version that sets just the right tone for a series based in some of the seamier precincts of Baltimore.

This season, the focus is still on the drug ring run by the now-jailed Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his right-hand man, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba).

But much of the action has shifted to the Baltimore waterfront, where 12 young women from eastern Europe have turned up dead in a shipping container.

While the cops from last season seem to be all present and accounted for, the series this season introduces viewers to an entirely new group of characters, the secretive and (sometimes) larcenous dock workers and their union chieftains.

The docks and the projects might seem like vastly different worlds, but the denizens of both have much to hide from the cops.

The cops in “The Wire” have problems of their own. In fact, the dysfunctional picture the series paints of the Baltimore police department is so damning it’s a wonder the series’ producers can get permits to film on the city’s streets.

If “The Wire” is more slow-moving than other cop shows, it’s because the series tells its stories over 12 episodes. Ordinary cop shows would find a way to tell the same stories in an hour.

Judging by the quality of the new season’s first four episodes, however, the depth to which the characters and the stories are explored on “The Wire” more than justify the show’s long-form approach.